Self: A Subjective History
a survey and synthesis, part 1
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“All ideas, especially abstract ones, are naturally faint and obscure: The mind has but a slender hold of them: They are apt to be confounded with other resembling ideas… When we entertain, therefore, any suspicion that a philosophical term is employed without any meaning or idea (as is but too frequent), we need but enquire: from what impression is that supposed idea derived?
– “Of the Origin of Ideas”, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume, 1748. (bolds mine)
1. A survey of views on the ground
Whence comes a self? What sort of thing is personality?
Here we pose inquiry toward some of the most “naturally faint and obscure” ideas out there. Answers to them have so far failed to solidify, it seems to me, partly through a lack of consensus on appropriate phrasings of the question, and partly through unwillingness to accept certain types of answers. If our approach here is to be at all new and interesting, we’ll have to be flexible on these points and refine our method as we go. Questions will be phrased and rephrased, and their answers, hopefully solid ones, will grow incrementally.
A roadmap of this piece: in the first half, I’ll sketch some original impressions of the ideas of “self” and “personality” as they’ve come down to us in poetry and philosophy; in the latter half, as well as later pieces, I’ll try to settle (as best as we can) the best of those impressions into their most fitting frameworks.
We can start with the two views on selfhood that seem most traditionally popular. Put simply, one grants the self a centrality in mental life which the other does not.1
The first view, “self-as-center”, may consist of a kind of village fortress which houses prized cognitive faculties (will, memory, etc.) surrounded by town— that is, bodily— bustle. The self-as-center might also be regarded as itself featureless, dimensionless, a kind of point or essence in the mind. Some traditions blend these two in strange ways.
The Christian/Cartesian tradition2 is often seen to favor this view: it sees simple, unified souls as the loci of will, memory, and other mental faculties.3 Descartes famously considered indivisibility the distinguishing factor between mind and matter. 4
“When I consider the mind, that is to say, myself inasmuch as I am only a thinking thing, I cannot distinguish in myself any parts, but apprehend myself to be clearly one and entire.
— Meditations On First Philosophy (1641)
An outward glance, Descartes said, reveals matter to clearly be divisible and various— the world resolves into buildings, trees, and sky; but an inward glance reveals the mind to be simple and singular.
A similar conception found expression in Shakespeare, in what seems far and away his most “religious” sonnet (though certainly not conventionally so, as Helen Vendler acknowledged). The first two lines offer some sense of the poem:
“Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth
[Fooled by]5 these rebel powers that thee array…”
Here in Shakespeare we have a picture of the soul as a stable center, and of the sources of instability that wobble it— the world (the “rebel powers”) and the appetites of the flesh (the “sinful earth”).
It’s easy to see how this picture lends itself to salvific narratives: here is the body—the peripheral, temporary, physical me— and here is the soul—the central, lasting, minded-me.6 The implication of course, when human nature is construed this way, is that we ought to care more about the center than the peripheral instability, because the center lasts; the center is forever.
Taking the soul or self this way, as basically the “not-body”, may even compel the irreligious. It seems to follow from that tranquil kind of introspection I’m sure most have felt, in which the noise and movement of the outside world lap against some still inner core. See Italo Calvino’s description in a chapter of Mr. Palomar, as the waterborne main character floats to an epiphany (bolds mine):
The swimming ego of Mr. Palomar is immersed in a disembodied world, intersections of force fields, vectorial diagrams, bands of position lines that converge, diverge, break up. But inside him there remains one point in which everything exists in another way, like a lump, like a clot, like a blockage: the sensation that you are here but could not be here, in a world that could not be but is.
For further impression of the self’s paradoxically intangible substance, consider too how we recall past experiences. We serialize day-to-day events into a somewhat coherent autobiographical narrative; we have a habit of stringing together events as they happen in time.7 Such progress in time is logged by the body only in a limited sense, the way a childhood injury leaves trace of itself for years after the event. But of course, the vividness of a past experience isn’t stored in such marks—those physical traces are more anchors or triggers of memory than memory proper.
Rather, as we know, in a memory a given episode is speedily, patchily, vaguely re-lived. A long-disappeared moment is sort of back again. And when the past links to the present in this abrupt way, its brief re-occupation of our mental “center” can make the visitation seem oddly unphysical. What is this center, that its present display can be so disrupted by a past performance? It’s not like any physical stage we know.
So the intuitive logic may go something like this: if traces of the past are so ghostly, and their re-enactments ghostly, then surely we ourselves—those mental centers—must be ghosts too.
But if we are indeed ghosts, we are rather odd ones. In life we typically don’t resemble those single-minded spirits which pursue their objects of interest (or vengeance) with supernatural monomania (a tendency of the Roman Manes, of not insignificant relation to the word mania). Our cares and goals often fluctuate; in the fullness of time they are rarely so unified as the above theory depicts.
So other theories account for this observed mental flux by absorbing it into the very nature of self, often to the point of denying any stable center.
Here we have a class of introspective thinkers who emphatically do not agree with Descartes. They do not believe in a stably existing, single self. For them, there is “no one” naturally keeping track of experience, or better yet, keeping experience on a track. See David Hume, our philosophical foil to Descartes:
“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call my-self, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception …I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”
He goes on to say that these various perceptions are bundled by some felt association or linkage between contiguous perceptions, which moves us to presume the existence of a still self present throughout perceptual change, a “poor soul” surrounded by the “rebel powers” of a sensuous world.
The notion of the self as a heterogenous bundle also shows up in a kind of poetic foil to the Shakespeare lines above, in a poem by Thoreau with an oddly familiar title. Bolds mine:
I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide,
Methinks,
For milder weather.8
Theories which lean away from the “center” view may be seen as overly sensual by the lights of those center-seeking partisans; their centrifugal opponents seem totally run by “the flesh and the world”, totally distractable, yes, even unreliable from moment to moment; they are at the mercy of Spontaneity’s decree.
In sum, these latter theories emphasize and elevate flux, and don’t see any kind of “center” to individual human life, or make the perception of it to be illusory, to dissipate with closer inspection. We are simply that which passes through our minds at a given moment, the sounds we hear, the scenes we see…
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These are the two oldest currents of thinking on the self, so far as I’m aware.
There are certainly easy ways of dealing with them. One way is to see the disagreement as a rather unnecessarily pedantic one— the two views are talking about the same thing in different ways, a kind of blind men and the elephant problem.
It might also be said that both Descartes and Hume had mental quirks that made them great representatives of each view, and for this reason may each be incomprehensible to the other— the strongly stable-self folks just can’t understand the strongly illusory-self folks, and vice versa.
The way these views have recently been cast in the public conversation, I think, is that the Cartesian view is the more observationally naive of the two. Oft-cited evidence for this is that children seem to start out as dualists; on these and other bases (most notably, Westernized strains of Buddhism) it became natural to think that the Humean view is what results from more “advanced” introspection.
This debate has been going for a long while. Long enough that thinkers have responded to claims of Humean sophistication by saying, for example, that the turmoil and flux one finds with such advanced introspection is not in fact the natural state of the mind, but is instead “highly artificial.”
The poet who finds by introspection that the soul is mere chaos is like a policeman who, having himself stopped all the traffic in a certain street, should then solemnly write down in his note-book ‘The stillness in this street is highly suspicious.’
C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, “Conclusion”9
Put a different way — why should it be surprising, after putting a stop to the natural organization of thought, to find mayhem in the mind? It’s rather silly to have done something to yourself, and, forgetting what you did, to take that self-altered appearance to be the normal state of things.
I take Lewis to be saying that the human mind is made naturally presentable by wearing the cover of custom and proper form. It’s true, decorum (in literature or otherwise) can obscure messy, complicated feelings, but this formal tendency of ours in fact distinguishes our species’ way of thinking and relating from other animals. It may have something to do with why we can get along with people we don’t know and whom with we otherwise have little in common. After all, most animals display nothing but their true feelings, and most animals hardly get along.
To bring this closer to contemporary debates, I think Lewis—and perhaps all “self-as-center” types—have what’s been called a homunculus view of human internal life. Inside you is, well, another you. With skin, arms, legs, everything that makes your bodily appearance look human. Our internal world is profoundly normal, that is, organized much the same way the external self seems to be.
The contrasting take is what has been called the shoggoth view. In it the internals of minds are chaotic and incomprehensible, and a pictorial representation must depict this if it’s to depict minds faithfully.
Both are onto something. Some in-between view might be nice, something humanoid, perhaps, since human minds tend to be recognizably human, at least to the extent we can faithfully and repeatedly interact with them. And besides, the human pose and limb-structure makes as much sense as anything to associate our particular mind-shape with. But representing them as a faithful copy of a particular body seems wrong. Maybe the Cycladics had it right, with their default-profile-picture sculptures:
The shoggoth meme was of course first used to describe LLM’s, not humans. Some opined that humans are also shoggoths, which I initially sympathized with. Since then I’ve come around to the Lewis view somewhat. Personality is human-shaped to the degree it’s formed by a lifetime of human experiences. That’s the relatively new part that thinks it runs everything. But the self is alien to the degree that it’s consists of the condensed lifetimes of creatures with no discernably human shape, and which today generate in us imperious sensations and apt compelling intentions. That self is old, and runs the show, and the second part of this brief history will be dedicated to it.
2. In which we attempt to escape the gravity well of subjectivity
It’s my view that introspection can get us only so far, and alone, resolves only so much. It’s kind of an unavoidable starting point: everyone starts on the same ground, so to speak, in having a first-person perspective. On this ground, one is stuck with the majority of people in history— including all the illustrious figures cited above. Not a bad place to be, at all. But I will try to persuade you, briefly, that staying on this ground is kind of optional.
It’s of course long been useful to the arts to contemplate particular vantage points. We can be moved to stand in this valley or that peak in the landscape of human experience based on how well someone constructs that landscape for us. Simulations of particular passions and interests are fitted for wear by other minds so they can joyfully or tragically pretend those particularities (for a time) belong to them. Perspective-taking is the most perennial form of entertainment and education.
The trouble is, this ground perspective rarely leads to descriptions that generalize. Local terrain tends to dominate our view: we’re too apt to describe events that have only happened to us as if they were universally affecting, taking the bumps of our real or invented troubles as if they were mountain ranges of tragedy. Our sense of “true” scale is informed by what we ourselves have experienced, or have read of others’ experiences. And this can be lengthy and arduous work to build up: many books must be read, movies watched, people talked to. But it was realized some centuries ago that this sort of method wasn’t suitably optimized for producing generalities. Romantically applying these methods to studying the natural world proved a dead research program.10
While we readily accept that the current scientific project doesn’t appear very limited when it comes to parts of nature we confidently deem non-mental, like clouds and meteors, we have trouble applying the same with respect to objects for which we take ourselves to have special access—including our own and even other minds.11 This is what the Goethean/Romantic (as opposed to Newtonian) branch of science was meant to account for, if unsuccessfully. My case here is we can have both, but only if we acknowledge that they do, and are for, entirely different things.
I won’t go into depth over all this now (to be developed in later pieces), but the main idea is the difference between what we might call a given object’s ‘thing-aspect’ and ‘person-aspect’. The thing-aspect of an object is characterized by its capability for tight definition and a tendency for consistent appearance, while the same object’s person-aspect possesses neither of these traits (Minsky once referred to the trait we look for in determining free will as “stochastic caprice”). And my sense is that a trained individual can toggle between these two aspects for the same object, whether a human being or a rock, more or less at will. The sciences in a way systematize the thing-aspect gaze; the humanities the person-aspect gaze.
A briefer and slightly different way of saying all this, for our purposes here, is to contemplate the third-person perspective: the act of zooming out from some starting point. Gazing down from up high turns a human into an ant, a moving dot. But you can see a lot more humans that way.
A key advantage of the zoomed out view of the sciences is that compresses adjacent locales, shrinking the largest and most familiar landmarks – but it also lets us include more in our thinking. An astronaut sees the planet entire, sees it all at once as a thing in which all of life and its history is collected all. Such a view does not bring with it instant understanding, but it does bring a powerful type of knowledge. A resident of the Amazon may know well the rich interconnections of her local lifeworld, but without going up into space will never discover that silt from the Sahara is what refreshes her home’s refreshing greenery.
There are certainly issues with this view. For one, looking at an uneven landscape from the top reduces substantial dimensions of, say, height, to dimensions of shading. But this is at least able to be corrected— we can make devices to reconstruct height from shading as ahem, a certain someone did 400 years ago. The occlusions and deprivations of perspective from staying on the ground aren’t so easily self-correcting.12
I don’t want to be too hard on the ground view, or too preferential to the view from space. To be trained in both the sciences and the humanities, in my view, is to be able to telescope up and down and sideways. It is to learn to toggle between thing-aspects and person-aspects. The well-integrated view ideally consists in the meta-ability of knowing what perspective to take, not unrelated to this passage from Plato:
Socrates: … our instrument of learning, together with the entire soul, must keep turning away from the fleeting appearances of things, until our soul is able to see steadily into the true nature of things and detect the clearest part of it…
So there should be some art of turning around [out of the cave] that would consist in finding the easiest and most efficient way of turning to light. This is not the art that gives us the ability to see, because we already have that; instead, it enables us to turn in the right direction and look where we are supposed to.
Should there not be such an art?
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Issues and advantages of both perspectives in mind, now we can turn to more recent attempts which have tackled our present topic of “selves” and “personality” with such an outside view, that is, with at least some knowledge of the nervous system, even if brains and nerves don’t always figure prominently. Leaving the early moderns, a good place to pick things up is at the beginning of modern psychology and physiology, when certain more compatibilist ideas started taking shape.
These compatibilist ideas tried to manage both the above-mentioned views on the self—central stability vs general flux— by picturing some stable place in the mind, into and out of which mental contents are free to move.
A choice example is the work of William James—the man who gave us such phrases as “stream of consciousness” (and much else besides)—who is especially known for two pictures of the self, one sort of fuzzy and one tight and clear.13
His fuzzier view is that the mind has a “hot place” and a “cold place”. The “hot place” in a mind is the center into and out of which various mental contents drift; whatever’s currently in the “hot place” commands our current interest and drives behavior. The cold place is everything peripheral, the “remoter outskirts of the mind.” (Recall how “hot” the un/subconscious was at the turn of the 20th century).
To illustrate this, in his lectures on “Conversion” (from the series that became Varieties of Religious Experience14 ), James imagines the transition occurring in the mind of a US president who’s gone fishing (bolds mine):
“The presidential anxieties have lapsed into the background entirely; the official habits are replaced by the habits of a son of nature, and those who knew the man only as the strenuous magistrate would not ‘know him for the same person’ if they saw him as the camper. If now he should never go back, and never again suffer political interests to gain dominion over him, he would be for practical intents and purposes a permanently transformed being.”
In James’ not-so-contrived situation, the President has been converted to a camper. If this seems an odd use of language, let me emphasize that James’ definition of conversion, as developed in the lecture, refers to the usurpation or displacement of what used to occupy the hot place by what was once in the cold periphery, those things we have encountered and learned but don’t give much “warmth” to.
For many, conversion has religious connotations, probably since religion is the most visible and energetic employer of the word. But for James religious conversion is merely one kind among many; he also discusses people who were converted “to ambition” or “to avarice” in other contexts. For James, conversion is best viewed as the most particularly sudden or dramatic way people can change. We were one way, now we are another; the previous self is someone else, and their troubles are not our troubles. Shakespeare again:
CELIA, as Aliena : Was’t you that did so oft contrive to kill him?
OLIVER: ’Twas I, but ’tis not I. I do not shame
To tell you what I was, since my conversion
So sweetly tastes, being the thing I am.
— As You Like It, IV.III, italics mine
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James’ tighter conception of selfhood can be found in a revised version of his famous Principles of Psychology essay on the topic. There he considers the self as a kind of “duplex”, not consisting of two separable parts, but of two “discriminable aspects’ which he calls I and Me. I is “the knower”, a kind of “pure ego”; Me is “the known”. Put differently, I is the bare observer or actor, and Me is a model of observation and action.
I roughly seems to correspond to the ‘hot place’ in the mind discussed above, Me to the ‘cold place’. I may be (hot and) single, Me contains cold, crystalline multitudes. What occupies the hot place are the parts of Me I melt and seize in order to achieve some task or lifestyle. Much of Me may be languishing at any given time, say, “the habits of a son of nature” during a tenure as President. The longer the habits of a fisherman have gone without use, the further they seem from a present self as head of state. But a fishing trip made permanent— old habits entrenching themselves in present behavior— is all it takes to warm up the old self.
James spends most of his essay attempting a taxonomy of Me. The Me-self, distinct from the things we watch or do now, covers all those things we can call ours, or feel a sense of ownership over: our bodies, our families, our property, our reputations, and so on. These are all things in which we hold a sense of personal stake, in which we feel more or less invested.
“All these things give [us] the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, [we] feel triumphant; if they dwindle and die away and die away, [we] feel cast down—not necessarily in the same degree for each thing, but in much the same way for all.”
(One of these things is not like the others: it’s not clear the extent to which we can be said to own our reputations. But James is on it there too.15 )
As we shift to more contemporary cognitive science for the next piece, we’ll discuss increasingly precise definitions of selfhood. Ownership will continue to be relevant, though we’ll try to get a subtler hold on it by tacking on the concept of control, the capacity to manipulate things we putatively own. For this we’ll need to explain why there may be types of selves among organisms, and why some and not others evolved nervous systems to begin with.
I’ll justify the hasty and imprecise treatment of these old views with the promise that their appearance here is wholly pragmatic— I’m using them to work out successively more novel ideas— so bear with me.
Christianity contains a diversity of views on this, ranging from nondualist to hylomorphic ones - but remember we’re discussing popular impressions.
It’s worth noting our current usage of the word self is inherited from the older usage of the word soul.
Going with George Santayana’s choice for what’s inside these controversial brackets.
This center might be seen as the constancy-enforcer a la MacIntyre.
After Virtue, Chapter 15: “The unity of human life”
Truthfully, I don’t think Thoreau had consistent thoughts on the matter, though they are often sublime. From The Maine Woods:
I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,—that my body might,—but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?
Part of an explanation for why some people find the structured, overly “decorous” language of epic not to their taste.
We did get many pretty pictures of plants and birds and animals though! Which are valuable!
This may have to do with the neural difference between world-modelling and agent-modelling, that is, whether we engage the theory of mind network or language + multiple domain network.
While this does mean the import of moving on the ground (effort, time, etc.) can be lost in translation for a space-being, who has to repeatedly translate map units to their own scale, they have the advantage of in a sense having the survey-perspective with the most expansive view.
Now, though the sections of James cited in this piece make no reference to the nervous system, his other essays in Principles of Psychology do so in spades. Furthermore, by the early 1900s, the physiology of reflexes as well as certain laws of psychophysics had by then been worked out to some general satisfaction.
These lectures on conversion inspired Bill Wilson to start Alcoholics Anonymous, as related in a letter by Wilson to Carl Jung.
A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind. To wound any one of these his images is to wound him. But as the individuals who carry the images fall naturally into classes, we may practically say that he has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups. Many a youth who is demure enough before his parents and teachers, swears and swaggers like a pirate among his ‘tough’ young friends. We do not show ourselves to our children as to our club- companions, to our customers as to the laborers we employ, to our own masters and employers as to our intimate friends. From this there results what practically is a division of the man into several selves.
When we cover mentalizing in later essays we’ll use different language to describe similar observations.